A London diary entry on chasing down the drinking dens a food icon once endorsed, a fire shutting the M25, and rediscovering your own city through someone else’s old haunts
With the Anthony Bourdain biopic, Tony, about to land in the UK, I found myself doing something I never expected: mapping out an actual pub crawl based entirely on the drinking dens he supposedly visited or endorsed during his own London trips, which is a genuinely strange way to spend a Sunday afternoon but also, somehow, exactly the kind of thing this city rewards.
Why Following A Dead American Chef’s Old Pub Recommendations Felt Weirdly Meaningful
I’ve lived here most of my life and still managed to discover two pubs this week I’d genuinely never heard of before, tucked away down streets I must have walked past a hundred times without ever really looking. There’s something quite lovely about using someone else’s specific, idiosyncratic taste as a map through a city you thought you already knew inside out.
What Actually Happened While I Was Off Chasing Old Bourdain Haunts
A large fire broke out next to the M25 this week, forcing a section of the motorway to close while firefighters worked to bring it under control, a stark reminder that the infrastructure ringing this entire city is considerably more fragile than the endless traffic reports would ever have you believe. I only found out because a friend messaged asking if I’d heard, having been stuck in the resulting diversions for the better part of an hour.
How A Motorway Fire And A Pub Crawl Ended Up Feeling Connected
It sounds like a stretch, but both stories this week were, in their own way, about the unglamorous scaffolding that actually holds a city like this together, whether that’s the ring road everyone takes for granted until it’s shut, or the small, unassuming pubs that quietly outlast every trend and biopic tie-in going.
What Actually Surprised Me Most About This Particular Pub Crawl
How unchanged some of these places genuinely felt. Whatever else has shifted about London’s drinking culture in recent years, there’s a specific kind of unpretentious, slightly worn-in pub that seems to exist entirely outside of fashion, and finding a few of those tucked into Bourdain’s old itinerary felt like being let in on a secret that was somehow hiding in plain sight the whole time.
What I’m Planning To Do With The Rest Of This List
Keep working through it slowly, ideally before the film actually comes out and every single one of these pubs gets flooded with people clutching the same list I’m currently clutching. There’s a particular, slightly selfish pleasure in discovering somewhere quietly, before it becomes a proper destination, and I intend to enjoy that window for exactly as long as it lasts.